What is pathos on in a commercial

Pathos is the persuasive technique that appeals to an audience through emotions. Pathos advertisement techniques invoke the senses, memory, nostalgia, or shared experience. Pathos examples pull at the heartstrings and make the audience feel. Aristotle’s rhetorical strategies from ancient Greece relate to pity, sympathy, and empathy.

A perfect example of pathos in a commercial is the following: In this commercial, the audience’s attention is captured through pathos. The audience watches the child cry when his mother leaves. Watching a child cry, gives the audience a feeling of sadness and makes them have sympathy for the child.

Within this field of potential fallacies are several sub-categories of pathos. Each sub-category has its own name and emotional tie. They include appeals to envy, fear, hatred, pity and pride — argumentum ad invidiam, metum, odium, misericordiam and superbiam, respectively.